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City Hall, the Manhattan DA and the Comptroller's office have recovered millions in stolen wages since 2023, but the protections still don't reach day laborers hired informally, off the books.
- A new data-sharing pact between Mayor Zohran Mamdani, DA Alvin Bragg and DCWP Commissioner Samuel Levine is expanding enforcement even as fear of deportation pushes complaints down.
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Worker centers in Queens and Brooklyn want the City Council to fund hiring halls, require contractor licensing checks and guarantee wage recovery without immigration status becoming leverage.
NEW YORK — City Council members and worker advocates are pressing to close what they describe as a persistent gap in New York's labor protections: legal cover for day laborers, the largely Latino and often undocumented workforce that staffs much of the city's construction and landscaping work. Prosecutors, city agencies and neighborhood worker centers all point to the same pattern — wage-theft complaints keep surfacing from immigrant crews on job sites from Queens to the Bronx.
New York Tightens Its Wage-Theft Enforcement
City government has spent 2026 sharpening its enforcement tools. In August, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Department of Consumer and Worker Protection Commissioner Samuel A.A. Levine signed a data-sharing agreement letting DCWP and the Manhattan DA's office trade leads on cases involving stolen pay, landlord harassment and schemes that prey on immigrants' legal status.
That pact builds on groundwork Bragg laid in February 2023, when his office opened a dedicated Worker Protection Unit, folding in an earlier construction-fraud task force. As of this summer, the unit's tally stood at a dozen indictments and roughly $2.4 million clawed back in stolen wages, in cases ranging from garment-district sweatshops to residential construction sites.
Where the Settlement Money Has Come From
The wage cases keep piling up outside the DA's office, too. Then-Comptroller Brad Lander's office reached a nearly $900,000 settlement in August 2025 after finding that a contractor and subcontractor on NYPD precinct-renovation work had shortchanged mostly Spanish-speaking immigrant crews — a case that, by that Labor Day, had pushed the office's cumulative worker settlements since 2022 past $15 million.
His successor, Mark Levine, has kept up the pace since taking office in January 2026. In his first four months alone, Levine's Bureau of Labor Law settled more than $618,000 with two Queens-based subcontractors and their prime contractor over underpaid wages and forged pay affidavits tied to the Hunts Point Playground rebuild in the Bronx — part of just over $1 million recovered across five separate cases in that stretch.
Inside the Worker Centers Fielding the Complaints
Long before a case reaches a prosecutor or the Comptroller, it usually lands first at a neighborhood worker center. New Immigrant Community Empowerment, headquartered in Jackson Heights, has become a regular partner for prosecutors building wage cases out of Queens. Hildalyn Colon Hernandez, the group's chief operations and strategic officer, has explained that subcontractors count on workers not realizing how much money they're actually owed, which gives unscrupulous employers room to "milk the contract" at their crews' expense.
Across the East River, the Brooklyn-based Workers Justice Project runs Construction Workers United, which operates a hiring hall for day laborers, delivers the safety training construction sites require under the city's Local Law 196, and negotiates directly with employers to push up pay for informal work. The group traces its roots to a citywide push a decade ago, when the City Council committed $500,000 to expand day-labor centers, at a time when the city's day-laborer population was estimated at 8,000 to 10,000 workers. That annual Council appropriation has since grown to roughly $3.97 million, though organizers say the increase still hasn't kept pace with demand. The National Day Laborer Organizing Network's local coalition, which has coordinated worker centers across all five boroughs since 2014, still puts the citywide day-laborer count at roughly 10,000 people working largely outside regulated employment.
Why Fear of Deportation Is Undercutting Enforcement
Advocates say the bigger obstacle isn't a hole in the law — it's fear of using the law that already exists. Complaints to New York's Division of Human Rights over immigration-status discrimination more than doubled, climbing from 163 to 371 between 2023 and 2025. Bragg has tied that climate directly to his own unit's caseload, acknowledging that "we've seen recently that our hotline numbers have gone down" even as the underlying exploitation continues.
In Albany, state Sen. Leroy Comrie has introduced Senate Bill S.2558, which would make it a crime to threaten reporting an injured worker's immigration status in retaliation for filing a workers'-compensation claim — a response, he has said, to workers who feel forced to choose between their safety and their livelihood.
What Advocates Want From the City Council Next
The Council has moved on adjacent fronts before. Council Member Shahana Hanif's Immigrant Workers Bill of Rights, passed in 2023 to shield newly arrived asylum seekers entering the workforce, rested on the idea that labor protections already on the books need to reach both new arrivals and longer-settled immigrants alike. Last December, the Council also passed the Construction Justice Act, setting a $40-an-hour wage-and-benefits floor on city-subsidized affordable-housing projects — evidence of the Council's growing appetite for construction-labor standards, even though that law doesn't reach the informal, day-to-day hiring that defines day labor.
Worker centers now want that same logic extended specifically to day laborers: expanded funding for hiring halls, mandatory contractor licensing checks modeled on the city's recent street-vending overhaul, and a guaranteed path to recovering stolen wages that doesn't put immigration status on the table as leverage.
Whether any of that becomes a formal bill this fall remains an open question the Council hasn't answered publicly. But with prosecutors, the Comptroller's office and City Hall now coordinating more closely than ever on wage-theft enforcement, advocates in Queens and Brooklyn argue that the political momentum — and the budget season ahead — make this the moment to write day-laborer protections into law rather than leave them to case-by-case settlements.
